Two of a Kind
by actionman81
Summary: Hayes Morrison deals with her inner demons. Can remembering her family, like grandfather Daniel Sousa, or her cousin, Michael Saunders, help her?


2016

"How about now?" Hayes Morrison turned to Connor Wallace after having just snorted a line of coke, to make her point about how she wasn't fit for a position at, let alone to lead, the Conviction Integrity Unit.  
God, the name sounded like something off of primetime drama television, as if Dick Wolf had written the title himself  
"Just do your damn job" Wayne hugged her

Hayes Morrison leaned back in her bed, still feeling the rush from her cocaine, the dash of red wine swimming in her stomach, and thought, not about her future, but rather, her past.

1989

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" her grandfather had asked her one afternoon when Hayes and her mother, Angela Morrison, nee Sousa, had arrived for a, as her aunt Ana had called it, a spot of tea. Aunt Ana wasn't really her aunt, and was more like another grandmother, but her real grandmother, Peggy, said that the woman was Aunt Ana, and the name stuck. Anything was better than Uncle Jarvis, whose real name was Edwin, but hardly anyone called him that. He looked like the butler from those dopey comic books that her cousin Michael always read. He was about her age, but he acted a lot younger. Hayes figured he was dropped on his head or something.  
Michael always had his nose in comic books, "I'm going to be a super hero" he showed her the Captain Patriot comic he was going through as if he was studying for a test. "What about you?" he grinned at her

2016

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" adult Hayes stared up at the ceiling. Her drug addled sense of reality shifted and she could've sworn that the ceiling tiles shifted around like the plastic tiles in the low tech games that her grandparents favored. Her Mum said that it was because their life was full of technology, so they liked to unwind with something easy, especially when the kids were around.  
"When we were there, she was always off somewhere, showing up just at the end"  
Grandma was always dashing off somewhere, some mission, she blurted out accidentally. Grandpa glossed over things, showing her, and Michael if he was there, a new trick, something babyish like the rubber pencil, or he'd do something ghastly with his leg. He had a prosthesis, and when he didn't feel like hobbling around their house, he'd lie on the couch, but leave his leg somewhere else, like behind a bookcase, so the shoe and ankle stuck out, as if the children were supposed to be afraid or enraptured or something. Hayes scoffed

1990

Michael couldn't get enough of those stories, "Tell me another one, Grandpa" he scurry up on Grandpa Daniel's knee, the real one, the one that wasn't missing anything after it, or up on the arm of the couch and listen while the old man went on and on about some crackpot who liked to hypnotize people with some garbage about focusing.  
Her father didn't believe in hypnotism, and maybe that's what drew her mother to her. Grandma said once, in passing, that she was different, that Hayes' mother, Angela Harper, had been different as a child, but with age, and maturity, things changed.  
"Maybe I could've been different" Hayes thought now, as the tiles stopped shifting, and now swirled around, like the way the milk and chocolate sauce swirled around when she had made chocolate milk as a girl  
"Do it faster!" cousin Michael shouted, not caring that his graphic t-shirt would get splattered with brown dairy product  
"No" she frowned at him, her felt hat perched just so on her head, "it'll make a mess, and your Mum will get mad"  
"She's just mad because Dad was late in bringing me here" he waved off any anger on his mother's behalf  
Ms. Saunders, there was never any aunt this or that with her, it was always Ms. Saunders. She'd gone to the trouble of changing Michael's name, too. The divorce had been rough on the two adults, but Michael had seemed to deal with it just fine, being shuttled back and forth until he was nearly in high school.

2016

Hayes smiled to herself, even to the ceiling, though there was nobody to see her. Michael was a weird kid. Most kids want to be police officers or fire fighters, and by the time they grow up, they toss aside those dreams for something more realistic, like being a doctor or a lawyer, but not Michael

1999

"Forensic Science" he had written on the form  
Teenage Hayes had glanced over. Sometimes, they still came over to each other's houses to do homework, just as they had in grade school, "Give me a break" she scoffed, "they'd never pick you as a cop"  
"Why not?" he glanced at her  
"Look at you"  
"So, look at me, so what?"  
"Whatever" she waved off his idea, and him

2016

But he had done it, he'd gotten into the police academy, and been a pretty good cop, still was, even when some crazy stuff happened in the city a few years ago, maybe more than a few years ago. He'd done alright, she thought  
"If he can do alright, maybe I can, too" Hayes grinned at no one in particular, "Maybe I can do the right thing"  
Maybe.  
There had been some show in the 1960s, and her parents—her mother had watched it, with her uncle, also named Michael, "Man, there were a lot of Michaels in our family" her brother Michael, her uncle Michael, and even some grand uncle she never had met, he was named Michael too.  
Hayes closed her eyes. The ceiling disappeared.

1988

The show. There had been some show in the '60s about two girls, cousins, and all these crazy things they did, and the theme song was annoying, infectious as her mother had said, and her Grandpa Daniel would sometimes sing it, just to tease her and her cousin Michael, when they were kids, "What a wild duet!/Still, they're cousins,/Identical cousins and you'll find,/They laugh alike, they walk alike,/At times they even talk alike -/You can lose your mind,/When cousins are two of a kind." and he'd laugh so hard that Hayes swore that he'd fall right off his robot leg

2016

Of course, Michael and she weren't identical at all, but maybe that song was right about one thing. If he could do the right thing, then maybe she had a chance to do that, too.  
Hayes opened her eyes. She knew what to do  
Maybe, after all, her cousin and she really were two of a kind.


End file.
